


Brighten the Corners

by montparnasse



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - America, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Rock Band, Drug Use, M/M, Music
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-24
Updated: 2018-07-24
Packaged: 2019-06-15 08:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,608
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15408681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse
Summary: Nowhere, USA, 1:47 A.M. Fate, love, nausea, and a seven-layer burrito at the Taco Bell drive-through.





	Brighten the Corners

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fluorescentgrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/gifts).



> named after the pavement album containing the immortal and severely r/s lyric, "[i trust you will tell me if i am making a fool of myself...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO7P6vXbnok)"
> 
> for gen. for many things. someday i promise i will write you Serious Literature.

By the time the band finished playing it was after midnight. Sirius had gotten a beer thrown at his crotch and another at his head and also missed the slim golden window in which he could’ve hooked up with Kingsley Shacklebolt in a trashed upstairs bedroom thanks to James’s assorted neuroses, which mostly concerned looking good and playing fucking hard in front of Lily Evans, who had spoken to him once for eight seconds at a party six months ago. From what Sirius could see after a few quick scans of the audience from the stage she wasn’t even there and had likely forgone the whole thing to do acid in the parking lot of the old abandoned Walmart—her favored pastime for as long as Sirius had known her. James did not appreciate having this pointed out to him, and thus they fought about it while Sirius was loading his pedals and an amp into his trunk, Peter looking on awkwardly from where he was sitting on a Marshall cabinet at the curb, listening to it all escalate like bad daytime television soundtracked by the shitty metal band playing in the backyard: James said Sirius had no sense of urgency and all he wanted to do was get stoned and listen to Joni Mitchell, Sirius accused James of hinging the entire operation on his dick and being more concerned with his hair than playing well or writing lyrics that weren’t shit, and likely they would’ve come to blows in another twelve seconds if Mary Macdonald hadn’t sent James a horny text just as he was warming up for a heinous round of emotional manipulation. Slamming the car door the minute James turned his back Sirius took off towards the country roads just outside of town to get stoned and listen to Joni Mitchell.

It wasn’t that he disliked being in the band, he reasoned, pulling over near some railroad tracks by the creek and fishing the joint out of his wallet along with a lighter. He’d wanted to start a band with James since he’d taught himself to play guitar with James’s mom’s third-hand Fender and YouTube videos in the Potters’ spare bedroom as a teenager, trying to imitate riffs from Stooges and Sonic Youth songs until he was good enough to start putting his own reeling spin on them. For one thing there was nothing to do in this town except start a band or cook meth and/or do heroin, though these things often went together like flint and tinder for better and for worse, i.e. worse. For another James really could sing when he wasn’t trying too hard to slip into some faux-mystical Jim Morrison lizard-king bullshit every time a girl looked his way. The problem was mainly conflict of interest, or lack thereof: James and Peter saw it all as an outlet for semi-guaranteed blowjobs and free drinks first, and a serious artistic endeavor second. But if you listened to James the problem was that Sirius needed to take his poetry and his daddy issues and his Dark Past to therapy and leave the rest of them out of it. Instead they fought about it. Sirius thought this was all especially hilarious considering James had never progressed much lyrically beyond sneering “Last Nite”-style sleaze and was forever attempting florid, increasingly desperate odes to Lily’s hair/tits/legs, all oozing away in a Google document under the appropriately redheaded working title “Cherry Pie,” though generally he was bitter that Warrant had gotten there first.

Really after a few hits it wasn’t so bad anymore; the pot wasn’t that great but it was enough to make the June-blue breeze in his sweaty hair feel like some sort of unearthly magic diffusing across his skin in a cyclonic shiver of static, or possibly it was just Joni’s voice, _I wanna knit you a sweater, wanna write you a love letter_... Overhead the pinwheel summer stars tore out of the black above the mindless stretch of the green earth to the west like promises, or possibility. When he took another hit and closed his eyes he could almost imagine them breathing or keeping time, which freaked him out enough to mentally compose a riff about it complete with an ominous wash of reverb which he would forget in its entirety by morning.

They needed another guitar player to shift the dynamic into melodic focus but they couldn’t find one. James and Peter hadn’t gotten along with McKinnon when Sirius asked her to play a few shows with them, and Sirius had hated the guy from James’s sociology class at community college, Benjy or something, who did way too much coke and seemed to think they were a thrash metal band; in all fairness James and Peter had hated him too. The music didn’t flow through them the way he knew it should. It shuddered up from James’s feet and up his throat into his mouth and then into Sirius like an underwater transmission or an evil spell and out to Peter who usually bludgeoned what was left to death with his kit. Privately he thought Peter had no sense of rhythm and possibly no soul but he knew this made him an asshole, so he kept his mouth shut about it and suggested albums he thought would help, with mixed results. Another conduit, he thought, preferably one who would side with him during biweekly arguments and appreciated how fucking sick Kim and Kelley Deal sounded together, would help translate the unwhole of them into something more, something transformative and real.

After a while he got out of the car and walked down the quiet slope of the gravel road in the flood of the headlights, wandering between the coneflowers into the desultory scattering of milkweed and thistle along the roadside where the crickets and the cicadasong droned a lullaby chorus like blood or wine into his ears, filling his lungs and seeping into each chamber of his heart and his gut and up every laddered rib-rung, singing like a Doppler hum in the electric curl of his spine. Then he remembered he was stoned. He took one more hit, feeling the sweet clean burn of it down deep in his chest, cauterizing the last of the last of his bleeding-raw nerves, and then stubbed the joint out in the tall grass and put it back in his wallet. By now James would likely be ensconced with Mary in the second bedroom of the matchbox-sized apartment he and Sirius shared; Peter was probably still at the house either trying to hook up with one of the girls from the punk band that had gone on before them or doing coke in the bathroom with that greasy Crouch creep Sirius didn’t like, which ruled out going back to either place for the time being. Combined with having to face the fact that their dismal cut from the door was probably a whole fifteen dollars it would’ve totally killed the vibe.

When he got back into the car he sat with his hands spread on the wheel like a faith healer listening to “A Case of You,” feeling at the edge of something monumental for no reason at all, filtering through the pleasant opaque haze of his stoned mind for options when he realized he was fucking starving. As was often the regrettable case when he was stoned at one in the morning nothing had ever sounded better than ordering everything on the menu at Taco Bell. It didn’t really matter that he’d wake up with heartburn so intense it usually felt like someone had poured battery acid into his aorta, nor did it matter that he might also wake up with food poisoning: in the moment nothing had ever soothed his various wounds or his nauseating all-you-can-eat buffet of Problems both real and imagined than weed and seven-layer burritos. In search of this precious medicine he set off again, stopping after he turned around at a decrepit electrical substation to switch Joni Mitchell for Pavement’s _Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain_ in keeping with his new stoned resolve. Just before he turned onto the main road back into town he had to slam the brakes when a coyote loped out of the weedy ditch and into the cornfield to the west, pausing in the shattering glare of the headlights to look at Sirius with a stark and hungry guile in its russet face so joltingly portentous he watched for a minute at the dark brittle stalks where it disappeared, wondering if it had happened at all.

No one else was at the drive-through when he got there and the parking lot was deserted save a couple of dingy cars parked side-by-side, likely employees working the night shift that existed purely to serve the nocturnal whims of brooding stoners who didn’t know and didn’t care what was good for them. Truth be told when he was truly wasted Sirius held the place in the same kind of rapturous holy regard he imagined people tripping on peyote in the desert held an oasis, or God. He thought about explaining this to the guy taking his order—his tinny voice over the intercom sounded almost familiar though this was perhaps because he’d been the last person to offer to maneuver Sirius’s bizarre laundry list into a combo—but then he asked if Sirius would like nacho fries with that and he sort of forgot about it. As he pulled around to the window having also forgotten his total he felt again the strange spinal frisson spreading like foxfire across his skin and into the night air itself, his heartbeat and his burgeoning blood shaking, as though all along he’d been waiting for something to happen. Then he pulled up to the window and found what it was.

The guy working the drive-through was tall with slightly bloodshot green eyes and very thin, like his limbs had been stretched out on a rack or perhaps he’d been assembled from old bones and older blood by the ancients in the monstrous heart of some miraculous desert and walked just born into civilization. Even through the slice of the window with the harsh fluorescent light lancing out into the night like a beacon for lost souls Sirius thought this; high or not nothing really deterred him from obnoxious poetics, which were never more warranted than when one discovered some kind of wild-eyed prairie nocturne working at the Taco Bell drive-through at 1:47 A.M. He wasn’t wearing a hat and his hair was a light and wiry copper-brown and Sirius could see many illegible tattoos on his arms disappearing into the sleeves of his t-shirt as every fried and fractured filament of his cracked-up brain screamed HOLY SHIT.

“Hi,” the guy said, the corner of his mouth lifting in a way that said he knew exactly what was afoot and which was so jarringly familiar Sirius knew they’d met somewhere before, but he couldn’t get his fingernails underneath the memory. “That’s thirteen sixty-five. You’re Sirius, right?”

“Yeah—shit, hang on,” he said, having forgotten he’d put his wallet in his back pocket, snagging his flannel on the seatbelt in the process of getting it out and belatedly hoping he hadn’t been staring too creepily. The guy laughed, bone-sharp and a bit hoarse, which sent a match-strike of déjà vu running so pure through Sirius’s gut he wondered if this was all because they’d known each other in a past life or in a dream. “Do you—what’s that noise?”

“You’ve got music on,” the guy said, smiling with teeth. From the speakers the first delirious notes of “Newark Wilder” had started playing.

“Oh. You’re right.”

“I like _Wowee Zowee_ best. But this is probably a close second.” 

Sirius could’ve just looked at him and known this, and he was about to say so until the guy leaned on the window, showing the single brutal black line of the scythe moon tattooed into the soft swell of his upper arm just above the elbow, and suddenly everything in the world solved like a lost language, or the sun coming out. “I know you,” he said, and then, when it hit, “fuck, that’s right—you’re Dearborn’s ex.”

Dearborn was the bassist in another local hardcore band Sirius had always liked; he’d been dating their notoriously elusive guitarist, which everyone knew but no one talked about, and from what Sirius had pieced together via inflammatory gossip he’d heard at various house parties and the diner downtown they’d had a falling-out swiftly followed by an acrimonious breakup around a month ago, with the fate of the band still uncertain. All of them had the same tattoo. As if shocked or slapped the guy jerked his arm off the window ledge and his whole expression changed, his eyes sharpening and then widening two sizes and his lip curling like he’d just stepped in dog shit. After a few seconds of seething speechlessly his nostrils flared furiously with what Sirius estimated was roughly 2% amusement and 98% malice, and very loudly he said, “That’ll be thirteen fuckin sixty—”

“No no no, fuck, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be like, I mean, you’re _Remus_ ,” he said with the grace of a caught trout flopping on dry land, one palm up in surrender. “I couldn’t remember your name.”

“So you decided to attach me to that fuck instead.”

It seemed to him that Remus had happily attached various parts of himself to Dearborn entirely of his own accord but he reckoned that saying so would’ve gotten all his food dumped in his lap. “Well, I mean, you’ve played together a long time.”

“You and James have played together a long time and I remembered _your_ name. Should I just start calling you James’s side piece?”

Sirius supposed he should’ve been stung by the implication that this was a considerable downgrade from James’s boyfriend, but he’d never felt that way about James, and Remus was right; it was pretty fucking funny, and besides he was too mystified by this seemingly preordained encounter and too stuck on the fact that Remus had remembered his name to care about anything else. “Fine. I get it.”

“Do you really.”

“I mean we don’t exactly know each other very well,” said Sirius, “we’ve said maybe five words to each other. Which is really a fairly generous estimate.”

“You’ve never exactly tried,” said Remus, with a curious spike of venom behind it.

“It’s not like you’ve ever been very talkative.”

“Neither are you,” said Remus, but he was leaning on the ledge again, watching Sirius with a strange and reverent apprehension, like he was the very mythological manifestation of every seductive influence in children’s fairy tales come to lead him astray. “I was at that show last week. You sounded good—you specifically. James needs to stop pretending he’s Jim Morrison on speed and then maybe you’ll get somewhere.”

“I keep telling him,” said Sirius, putting the car into park and finally handing over a twenty-dollar bill. “He royally does not listen to me. Maybe he should hear it from you too.” He could hear the song was winding down and into the silence the voice sang crystal and vivid and reckless as fever or yearning, _My my my my my my my I love your tinted eyes_... “I always thought this was their horniest song,” he said.

Again Remus laughed. Sirius was still surprised that this was something he could apparently conjure from him and like any other high he was already thinking about how to do it again, and worrying about what would happen if he couldn’t. “I think so too,” said Remus, “but ‘Heaven Is a Truck’ also kind of works.”

“If you want they could both be about car sex.”

“Who wouldn’t want. Anyway—” he paused to hand Sirius his change, letting his fingers brush the soft skin and the blue skip of veins on the inside of his wrist in a way that felt deliberate— “what I was saying is I like that thing you’ve been doing, that abrasive edge kind of undercut with this sheet of noise. It’s like Green River on LSD. Half the guitarists from here to Kansas City have ripped it off. I’ve ripped it off, or the skeleton of it anyway.”

“Yeah. I know you did. But I mean I don’t trust anyone who says they’ve just got influences. That’s bullshit. Everyone’s ripping off from someone...”

“Sure. But to not even try to do anything with it.”

“To tell you the truth I’ve totally ripped off from you before,” Sirius told him, “but it’s like, you sort of deconstruct it, you know? You have to remake it yourself from like, the hollowed-out bones and then work your way out out. Otherwise it’s like, you’re just wearing clothes that don’t fit and everybody’s gonna see your ass eventually.”

This was the right thing to say, he supposed, because Remus was smiling a little on one side of his mouth again and fixing him with those dark green eyes with an intensity that made Sirius think the flush he was feeling was coming from whatever magical wellspring or ley line they’d summoned between them. “I noticed,” said Remus. “The ripping off, I mean, not your ass.”

“You could notice my ass if you wanted. I wouldn’t mind.”

“Sirius.” Remus was leaning his whole head out the window. He’d taken his headset off long ago and the square of light from inside haloed his messy hair and his crooked nose like a bemartyred saint but sexier. “Are you trying to fuck me through the drive-through.”

“You know I wouldn’t do that, like, you’re at work, you can’t just tell me to fuck off.”

“One, that wouldn’t stop me, and two, at this point I don’t think you’re just here for food. Or else you’d be whining about it taking so long like half the other dumb stoners who come through here.”

“Alright. Fine,” he conceded. “Maybe a little. Aren’t you?”

Remus, grinning, not breaking eye contact, backed away from the window. “Hang on a minute,” he said, “I think it’s gonna be a while on your empanada.”

He was almost certainly lying. Sirius had never been more turned on in his life.

Across the sleepy road he watched someone walk behind the boarded-up place that had once been an appliance store, likely waiting to make a drug deal; he could see a dryer spinning clothes through the window of the all-night laundromat but there was no one inside. Not far away was the Rural King where Sirius worked bleary-eyed early mornings taking care of plants and livestock and unloading trucks full of farm equipment and horse shit. It was weird, he thought. Despite being in the same small and often incestuous scene in the same small town for some time now he knew very little about Remus, though he supposed Remus could’ve said the same of him. No one seemed to know where he came from: Peter said he was a crazy hipster from New York and also insisted he was on and/or dealing heroin, though he’d thought the same of Sirius at several memorable intervals throughout their friendship. James had heard he was from Vincennes, but McKinnon and Lily Evans said he was from some unspecified place in the Pacific Northwest. As far as anyone knew he’d just shown up at the diner one day about three years ago with his guitar and a backpack, sort of living out of his car; legend had it that it was on this fateful hungover morning that he’d met Dearborn. The single unbreakable common thread stitched through all of these stories held that he’d run away from something, though exactly what the something was varied massively depending on who you asked. Having run off at sixteen himself Sirius understood his unwillingness to engage in the ongoing trauma of not having control over the gruesome dissection of your very public personal narrative.

Really there wasn’t much else. His guitar playing was not dissimilar to Sirius’s but it had an acid, anxious edge like a bad omen whereas Sirius’s was a bit more splintering and blitzed-out, or at least he wanted it to be; they shared both indestructible affection for corrosive feedback and meltingly hallucinatory shockwaves of noise. On stage he didn’t move much, and he’d occasionally seen Dearborn reach around Remus’s waist and detune his guitar or suggestively pluck out a chord, though the only thing that seemed to piss Remus off about this was that it sounded like shit because Dearborn really couldn’t play guitar. The thought of doing this himself was so smotheringly possessing he only just noticed he’d been gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had gone a rigid chalk-white. Playing with him, Sirius thought, would possibly be better than fucking him.

“Someone dropped your empanada on the floor,” Remus said when he came back. “Can’t have you getting E. coli or anything.”

“That’s sweet of you. Especially considering the stuff here is like barely beef.”

“Lettuce and stuff is the bigger problem really. You can’t be too careful.”

“Yeah. I don’t eat red meat anyway.”

“Neither do I,” said Remus. “Did you want sauce with all this?”

“Oh.” He’d been so enthralled by the mere fact of Remus’s existence that he’d forgotten even though this was usually the thing that swam to the forefront of his stoned mind on nights like these as if there was nothing else worth thinking about in the world. “Like, a shitload of fire sauce. Just like, so much—and a shitload of whatever you want too.”

At this Remus stopped midway through shoveling a second fistful of fire sauce into a bag and looked at him with an anxious glint deep in the back of his bright green eyes. Sirius hadn’t realized he was worrying his lip until he tasted the vivid iron-tang of blood from having bitten through it. “Do you have any more pot,” Remus asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not gonna eat all of this?”

“Fuck no.”

Remus grabbed another fistful of sauce and then he said, “I’m off in about fifteen minutes.”

“If you want I can take you by your place first,” said Sirius. Last he knew Remus was living in a shambling punkhouse on a street comprised mainly of college students’ squalid flophouses with Dearborn and a few other roommates who played in various other bands. It was doubtful he was still staying there, and indeed Remus sort of jerked his head to the left.

“I’ve been sleeping on Benjy Fenwick’s couch,” he said.

“You know him?”

“He played drums for us for a while when Dorcas quit. We put out that tape last winter with him on it that I fucking hate.” Sirius had thought at the time that the tape sounded odd and off-kilter, like they were all coming at it from oblique angles but could never quite lock into any unifying flow. Certainly Fenwick’s abrasive presence explained much of this. “He’s an asshole but he’s hardly around and he doesn’t ask questions. And anyway I’ve got a shirt in my car, that’s all I need.”

“He played guitar for us for like two weeks. He kept acting like we should be fucking Black Sabbath or something and he honestly creeps me out.” Sirius had long thought that sometimes you could tell within two minutes of meeting someone that they did knife hits and listened to way too much Merzbow, and Fenwick had done little during their brief acquaintance except prove him right. “Pretty sure he sold me shitty acid too. But I should’ve known better.”

“Sounds like him. He’s also never cleaned a kitchen in his life.” Remus handed him a bag full of sauce that must have weighed at least a solid pound. Again he let his fingers ghost along Sirius’s, softly, softly. “Why was he playing guitar for you.”

“Because James can’t. I don’t mean to sound like an asshole, but it’s, you know. He does better with bass.”

“Bass suits him,” said Remus, “he’s got more potential there. You all would.”

“Plus thinking about his dick is like, a full-time job for him.”

Laughing, Remus handed him his lemonade and two straws. “I wasn’t going to say anything. He’s too obvious with the metaphors… I can always tell what songs are his.”

“I mean they’re barely even metaphors at this point, it’s just shit he thinks is gonna get him laid. Or it’s whining that he’s not getting laid. And they’re way too fucking straight.”

“That’s what I meant. You’re obsessed with death and decay.”

“And you’re not?”

“I am,” said Remus. “If I had to guess I’d say I think it comes with the territory for us.”

“It’s like—it’s that space between wanting and having, I guess. Or desire and consummation, or love and death, or sex and death, or obsession and death, or violence, or maybe just the ways they all go together, which is really where everything happens. It’s never either/or, I mean I honestly don’t think you can have one unless you’re willing to take the others.”

“Exactly. And then you start to wonder—would you want one without the other? Can you even separate them? Or maybe you’re just really fucked up.”

“Pretty sure being fucked up is endemic to us. Or at least we probably wouldn’t be talking about this or thinking about it so much if we weren’t.” This was by far the most romantic conversation he’d had in months and he found himself hoping wildly that the inexorable erotic sliver between love and death was just as sexy for Remus. He seemed the type. “Anyway that’s why I like you. How you play, you know, I can feel that. It feels like being embalmed.”

“You’re so high, holy shit,” said Remus, “not that I don’t—”

“Shut up, no I’m not. And that’s why I’m telling you—there’s nothing else like it. I know I’ve never told you but you’ve taught me a lot.”

“Thanks,” said Remus, sounding surprised, his smile so rare and so honest it made Sirius’s mouth go dry. “You should’ve come earlier, I’d have given you all the leftover cinnamon twists.”

“James would’ve had three consecutive strokes and an aneurysm if I hadn’t been there to listen to him worry about this one song being way too obviously about Lily Evans’s ass.”

“I can already promise you it’s too fucking obvious,” said Remus. “What you need is someone to overrule him because Pettigrew’ll never side with you over James. Anybody can watch you and see that. But if you found someone else, you could go to bat for them and they could do the same for you, et cetera.”

All of a sudden the chaos theory at the center of the universe and the perfect primordial mystery of life sparked and resolved on the holy trinity of his heart and soul and libido in such a way that he would later claim he would’ve arrived at the same conclusion even if he’d been stone-cold sober. Every step he’d ever taken, he understood, was to bring him closer to the Taco Bell drive-through at near-on two in the morning on a Saturday in June so he and Remus could meet. It was easy arithmetic, simple conjugation. He would never have another chance like this. None of them would ever have another chance like this, though he couldn’t expect James and Peter to comprehend the seismic magnitude of what they were missing, which was so much bigger than themselves, or any of them. When he looked at Remus in the window the percussive slamming of his heartbeat felt like something coming alive again, taking his first breaths on the first day of his life; it was making him dizzy. More startlingly he thought he could see the same affliction in Remus’s wild green eyes, in his open mouth.

If James and Peter didn’t like it they could go fuck themselves. They’d subjected him to enough shitty lyrics and intra-band melodrama over the years that he wasn’t even sure they deserved the colossal life-saving favor he was about to do them both; that Sirius was about to subject them to infinitely better lyrics but doubtlessly more melodrama seemed unimportant. At least it would be interesting melodrama for a change. To his open blossoming mind nothing had ever made more staggering sense than grabbing Remus’s wrist through the glassy-white rime of light with the sincerity of a marriage proposal to search out the heartbeat in his branching vein-lines, the pulsebeat of it running quick against his own, like all the music he hadn’t heard, like all the songs yet unwritten between them, thinking that maybe it truly was this simple.

“You ought to come sleep on our couch,” said Sirius, his breath still coming sharp with the horse-kicked feeling. Remus was looking him right in the face as if he’d just walked out of a dream, or maybe into one. Dimly he was aware that the light was probably severely unflattering but he didn’t care. “Or actually you can have my bed. We can switch off, it’d be fine.”

“You can’t be serious,” said Remus, but he looked like he was thinking about it. He still hadn’t pulled away.

“Wouldn’t it be better than Fenwick.”

“Don’t be a dumbass. I know what you’re really asking and I know how this shit usually turns out.” At last he jerked his wrist from Sirius’s grip. “And you hardly know me, you’re not—you couldn’t even remember my name when you pulled up here.”

“I have a shit memory. Or only sometimes I guess. But actually I remember a lot about you. And no—no, listen, like, I did some soul-searching while you were dropping my empanada on the floor.” 

In fact “soul-searching” was usually what Sirius called it when he got high and/or jerked off and listened to Spacemen 3, but Remus didn’t know any better. Or Sirius hoped he didn’t.

“Are you sure about that,” Remus asked, looking suddenly like he very much did know better.

“Yeah. I have a theory.”

“Oh my god.”

“Fuck off, this is serious. I wouldn’t still be here if there wasn’t—don’t you get it?” Cutting through the music and the frantic alien chant of the first summer katydids he swore he could hear Remus’s heart, or maybe it was his own; any distinction seemed somehow insignificant. “This was supposed to happen, I swear to god. I don’t even care about sounding like an idiot in front of you, it’s like, probably nine times out of ten when people say anything’s meant to be or whatever they’re full of shit. Me coming here for a fucking burrito and then asking you to join the band is like, I don’t know. It’s like how you felt when you first played guitar or realized you could write poetry, or understand somebody else’s poetry. Or that there’s a word for something you never understood in yourself. Water suddenly flooding the wasteland, you know?”

Remus was watching him with such an apocalyptic intensity Sirius had to force himself not to look away. “Marlene McKinnon told me you do a lot of DMT,” he said.

“That’s not—who gives a fuck.”

“I don’t. I’m just saying, maybe in the morning it won’t be as good as it seems.” Through his long nose Sirius heard him take a deep, steadying sort of breath. “Then again she also said I shouldn’t have been with Dearborn in the first place because he’s a Gemini.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“We weren’t like, compatible I guess. Our stars were fucked. I’m a Pisces.”

“Oh.” He’d never understood much about astrology and found himself wondering rabidly if he and Remus were astrological soulmate material. “So that whole time he was clashing with your sexy Pisces energy or whatever.”

“It’s like oil and water, apparently. Don’t ask me how that’s supposed to work.”

“I’m a Scorpio,” said Sirius, luxuriating in the soporific New Age-y unmeaning of it, “but to tell you the truth I don’t know shit about it. I have no idea what that means.”

It looked as if it meant something to Remus, who went very still and blinked slowly at him until Sirius at last turned away to watch some guy pissing across the empty road in the full flush of the streetlight. “I don’t know what it means either,” said Remus, “I don’t know what any of this means.”

“I’m honestly not trying to fuck you through the drive-through, I swear. I really wanna play guitar with you.”

“What if it doesn’t work out.”

“Then it doesn’t work out,” said Sirius, not even sure he meant it. “And I mean, if it helps, I may be a dumbass but I _do_ put out. If you want.”

Remus made a face like he wanted to laugh, or puke, or maybe both, which Sirius supposed mirrored the potent cocktail of yearning and stoned sincerity and mounting cosmic terror he was hoping to soothe with some nacho fries and stomach-searing fire sauce. He considered asking Remus if he’d like some of his naked chalupa but decided it sounded too raunchy for the strange sloppy reverence of the moment and took the bags Remus handed him unspeaking, not a sound anymore save the song amid the cicadas and the sweet hypnotic nighttime hush: _So drunk in the August sun, and you’re the kind of girl I like, because you’re empty and I’m empty_...

“You know I’ve kind of done this once before,” said Remus. “I’ve done it almost—this is almost exactly how I did it, is what I’m saying. It’s uncanny.”

“I’m not him,” said Sirius. Even as he said it he wasn’t sure whether this was a good thing or a bad thing; given the way Remus was watching him, like he was a piece of broken glass underneath his bare foot, he understood that neither of them had a clue. They were going to cut themselves on each other. It was inevitable. Even now it would be undifficult. “For one thing I don’t look anything like him.”

“Obviously that’s not—”

“And I play differently. I don’t sound like him at all.”

“I know you don’t. I wouldn’t want you to.” 

“You’re making me all sweaty, man…”

“Well I don’t mean to.” Threaded through Remus’s voice and in his narrow mouth was a pang of uncertainty so naked and nervous that for a splitting heartbeatless moment Sirius felt a sudden thunder-burst of fear surge up from the stem of his spine and into his gut; in the throes of it he realized they might both regret this. But because there was never any way to know except to try, and because Remus’s eyes were very soft again, and because neither of them seemed to know what to do about any of it, he bit his tongue while Remus asked, “You promise you’ve got more pot?”

“Yeah, I do. I promise,” said Sirius. If he had to he’d have gone and hammered on Emmeline Vance’s door—she grew it in her trailer out by the river—and paid whatever she demanded without question, up to and including stolen family heirlooms he saved to fund special occasions and/or catastrophes e.g. when he wanted to drive into the woods and do peyote and write fucked-up songs about his dreams all weekend. Saying this to Remus felt sort of desperate, so instead he swore again, almost prayerful this time: “I promise.”

“Give me five minutes.”

“You want me to—”

“My car’s the shitty station wagon,” said Remus. “I’ll be right out. You’d better fucking wait for me.”

The light wreathed his uncombed hair in the dark like a crown of thorns and spread over the slouching range of his shoulders down his wrists to the long fan of his fingers on the window ledge, hanging on as hard as he could to whatever this was, or whatever it might be. All along his arms the runic blue-black of his tattoos shifting tectonically with every movement. Looking at him was better than seeing the ocean or the Tetons or summer rainfall in the Cascades. It was like eating an eighth of mushrooms and listening to the dusty-warm thrum of late-night radio while the sun came up against the static—just talking to him was better than hearing _Spiderland_ or _Loveless_ for the first time, better than all the squalling feedback in the world, better than Christmas morning, better than the vaulting black band of prairie sky promising anything and anywhere. Smoking pot and eating Taco Bell with Remus would be better than looking at any painting in any gallery anywhere in the world; it would be better than Thanksgiving dinner or going to Paris or doing magic. He thought there was a poem that went like this but he couldn’t remember what it was called. Surely there was room for one more.

“I can wait,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.” Then he shifted the car into gear and pulled away to wait in the back like a bride at the altar, or else a living sacrifice to the ungods of fate.

When he parked he tried to peer inside Remus’s car through the dirt- and pollen-dusted windows but he couldn’t discern much save that it was more of a controlled, orderly mess than Sirius’s, like a code only he could read. In the front seat he could make out the scratched jewel case of the Raincoats’ _Odyshape_ and a t-shirt, a pack of cigarettes and what looked like candy wrappers on the dashboard. Waiting like this with the windows open smelling fast-food grease and the wilting humid breath of the tulip trees and honeysuckle with the stars spilling over the neon night-lights like a topographic map he could almost pretend he and Remus alone were about to set off on a secret foray into the burnt and bloodied heart of some American myth, knowing that if they came back at all they would come back changed.

This could be anything, he thought. This could be everything and everywhere. Or maybe he was just stoned. Maybe it didn’t fucking matter. Reflected like a run of quicksilver in Remus’s rearview mirror was the ghostly neck of his guitar in the trunk, leaning against the headrest.

He was thinking about switching Pavement for his exhaustive playlist of songs curated specifically to distract him from processing feelings too horrifying to contemplate, but then he heard footsteps, quick at first, and then slow, startled, as if they couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. From the rearview mirror and then through the window Sirius watched while Remus changed his shirt and then, as if following some directive of uncertain origin, as he unlocked the trunk and took out his guitar and placed it carefully on the backseat floorboards of Sirius’s car, nestling the head into the soft blue flannel shirt he’d thrown back there months ago just as Sirius shoved the old saddle blanket from the passenger seat onto the floor. Without a word Remus got in, and after a minute of stunned and stretching silence he put on _Wowee Zowee_ ; Sirius could feel him watching his hand tighten around the gearshift. Together they drove off into the west where the fog was unscrolling like a shroud through the forests and the bounding fields into the wide open world to come.


End file.
